Posted on 03/20/2008 7:24:49 AM PDT by Delacon
For the record, I still believe that deposing Saddam was justified and useful. He was a Hitler, and he was our enemy. But I'm still reeling from the snotty incompetence with which the Bush administration acted. Above all, I'm ashamed that I trusted President Bush and his circle to have a plan for the day after Baghdad fell.
All of our other failures in Iraq stemmed from this fundamental neglect of a basic requirement: Our soldiers and Marines reached Baghdad without orders or strategic guidance. We became the dog that caught the fire truck. The tragedy is that it didn't have to be that way: One thing our military knows how to do is plan.
But the relevant staffs were prevented from doing so. Ideologues and avaricious friends of the administration wanted the war for their own reasons, and they didn't intend to alarm Congress with high cost estimates. So they trusted the perfumed tales of a convicted criminal, Ahmad Chalabi, rather than the professional views of the last honorable generals then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had not yet removed.
Even on the purely military side, the White House put its faith in hopeless gimmicks, such as "Shock and Awe," convincing itself that ground troops were an afterthought. Of course, it was the old-fashioned grunts, tankers, gunners and supply sergeants who had to get us to Baghdad.
Iraq just didn't have to be this hard.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
And it only took 3 weeks to win Iraq.
We might have gone in with more troops. It may well have been different, but I don't think it necessarily would have been better. More boots on the ground in a counterinsurgency also means more targets.
It's not unfair at all to suggest that the surge worked when it happened, but had it happened early and in more force that the Iraqi people would not have been as ready to turn the corner and take sides *with* us rather than not. It was the change that happened in the hearts and minds that changed things on the ground. It wasn't merely the extra troops, it was the commitment that the surge demonstrated, that showed they could trust us not to leave them to the wolves.
IMHO.
You can look at all past major wars and find major foul ups in every single one of them. I guess this one was supposed to be different because.....?
“Were there mistakes? Yes, BUT THAT IS THE NATURE OF WAR.”
Agreed.
It is not an excuse, simply fact.
“I took the article as more of a BDS rant than an honest analysis of how the war was fought and what lessons could be learned from the mistakes (other than “Bush Sucks”).”
Well any critique of a war is practically by definition a critique of the president who presides over it. I don’t think any war has ever been initiated over the objections of the president in office. Bush is the leader. He has to take his lumps even if Iraq turns out the be the most successful campaign in US history. Aside from that, I think the one area that this article doesn’t cover and should is by not pointing the finger at us, the citizenry. No president can conduct a war as effectively as he should because the American people have set standards that make quick in and out campaigns the only politically exceptable option. We aren’t the same people of WW2 fame. No sacrifice is to little these days.
bttt
“It is not an excuse, simply fact.”
Sounds to me like an excuse. Just because wars are by their very nature chaotic and filled with mistakes, doesnt mean we should overlook the mistakes. A fair assessment is in order. I will agree that saying Bush is the worst wartime president in history is as one poster said “over the top”.
To all of you Bush haters out there: Terrorists including alQaeda, from all over the world have been flocking to Iraq to fight the U.S. Military. Is that a bad thing?
take your time...
Never said overlook the mistakes. Simply accept that will happen and learn from them. But each war is unique. Thus.. mistakes will be made everytime to varying degrees.
IMHO
Hindsight is great isn’t it. Makes you look sooo much smarter than the people that actually have to do the job in the first place.
It’s kinda funny how Ralph Peters was considered a highly competent authority on the Iraq military campaign among many folks here on FreeRepublic when he was a consistent supporter of the administration for the first 3-4 years after the invasion of Iraq, but he’s suddenly become something of a pariah among some of us now that he doesn’t toe the party line so much anymore.
I admit that my only frustration with the Iraq war was that no one was tasked with winning the peace.
See the war only lasted 28 days. The MSM keeps refering to our “ongoing war in Iraq” and that’s a false statement. We are not at war with Iraq. We already won that war...in 28 days.
What we didn’t do is finish the war with a cohesive plan to win the peace, which is the harder task in the grand scheme of things.
We would have been well served to take some of the lessons from the end of the axis powers and applied them. Even that would have been an improvement to what we did do.
At the end of the day though the people of Iraq now have the ability to decide their own fate which is something that they havent had for over 50 years. So I dont regret us going in there.
What I see is a problem is the American public expecting war/military action to wrap up neatly like a 30-minute sitcom with absolutely no mistakes and no casualties, and costing very little money. They want it gone and done away with so they can just “go back to normal.” We’re used to getting what we want fast and quickly, with minimal fuss.
When this whole thing started five years ago, I remember telling a co-worker that I had no doubt we would overthrow Saddam Hussein fairly quickly. Arabs are terrible at modern conventional warfare. The tricky part, I said, was going to be stabilizing the country.
The Bush administration DID make mistakes. But it certainly wasn’t helped by the Democratic party or the MSM, which was determined to see us fail in Iraq for partisan reasons. The constant carnage reports and “we can’t win” mantras demoralized the public and emboldened the terrorists for two years. The Bush administration should’ve done more to communicate with the public about our objectives and remind people of why we’re there in the first place, and why it’s important to win. But it would’ve had to shout over the heads of the news media, pop stars, Hollywood, etc..
“It’s kinda funny how Ralph Peters was considered a highly competent authority on the Iraq military campaign among many folks here on FreeRepublic when he was a consistent supporter of the administration for the first 3-4 years after the invasion of Iraq, but he’s suddenly become something of a pariah among some of us now that he doesn’t toe the party line so much anymore.”
Well said.
To me, that was a clear indication that the military campaign and post-invasion occupation of Iraq was, in fact, costing this country far more than anyone in Washington was willing to admit, and was an ominous warning about what was certain to become a massive increase in monetary inflation in this country. Some astute Freeper(s) have pointed out that the real rate of monetary inflation in this country is now somewhere on the order of 18% -- which makes the "official" inflation data published by the Federal government downright comical.
In defense of the Pentagon, I should point out that they really didn't have much of a choice in the matter. They were given a completely unrealistic task to accomplish (in terms of both manpower needs and financial costs), and they basically had to make do with what they had.
“Well any critique of a war is practically by definition a critique of the president who presides over it.”
Granted, and that would be acceptable. But the words “snotty incompetence” don’t comport with an objective analysis — it’s just bashing.
Anyone who thinks our expectations for a stable post-invasion Iraq are completely unrealistic should remember that it was people in the Bush administration who made these predictions, not us.
My hesitation about supporting the invasion of Iraq turned into outright opposition back in late 2002 or early 2003 when I watched a television interview in which U.S. Department of Defense official Richard Perle responded to a suggestion that the troop levels under consideration at the time were extremley insufficient -- by suggesting that the U.S. didn't even need ground troops at all. From that point forward it was clear to me that this adminstration was filled with @ssholes who had no idea what the hell they were doing.
“Granted, and that would be acceptable. But the words “snotty incompetence” don’t comport with an objective analysis — it’s just bashing.”
Well Ralph Peters is a editorial journalist(who are not known for their quiet reserve). He isn’t a historian and even historians often stray from “objective analyis”. But when future historians put pen to paper and want to find a good gage of American frustration with Bush and the Iraq war, they might find this article a good reference.
. . . because countless people in the Bush administration made it very clear that it would be different?
Notice that I said we’ve been at the LOW INTENSITY side of this for 5 years. We were at WWII for only the 4 years. There was no lingering low-intensity conflict going on being the Germans or the Japanese. They each unconditionally surrendered.
There is every reason to think that 100,000 more boots on the ground would have prevented the insurgency from getting off the ground. For one, the experienced military commanders BEFORE THE WAR, who had no political ax to grind at that time, said so.
I’ve taken a lot of grief over the years for standing up for Shinseki, but he was a good general, and his ideas prevailed. The surge proves it.
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